Rebecca, the Musical, based on the renowned du Maurier novel, was veteran producer Ben Sprecher’s shot at the big time. Believing he had found the next Phantom of the Opera, he fully expected to have a Broadway hit on his hands. In a saga that veers from tragedy to surrealism, David Kamp details the blows to Sprecher’s dream: the “death” of a key investor, the discovery of a con, and the furtive maneuverings of a seeming ally.

It should have all been happening by now. Had everything gone according to Ben Sprecher’s plan, Rebecca, the Musical would have opened on Broadway last November, a juggernaut loosed upon American theater. The show’s logo, a flaming, curlicued capital R, would have hung proudly above the marquee at the Broadhurst Theatre, on West 44th Street, and reproductions of the logo would have adorned the sides of city buses trundling up and down the avenues of Manhattan. On Saturdays, giggly packs of teenage theater-arts girls would have been spilling out of the matinee, belting out “Last niiiight I dreammmmt of Mannn-derley!” in imitation of Jill Paice, the pretty actress cast as the show’s nameless protagonist: a dowdy young English innocent recently married to the wealthy Maxim de Winter, and soon haunted by the spectral presence of his deceased first wife, the titular Rebecca.

The reviews—well, they might not have been outright raves, and probably Ben Brantley of The New York Times would have faint-praised some of the musical numbers as “serviceable Lloyd Webberian pastiche with the odd Mitteleuropean touch,” or something like that. But the notices would have been good enough, and, besides, the show had been engineered to succeed without hipster cool or critical gush. Sprecher’s PowerPoint presentation for potential investors notes that Rebecca is “a production that is targeted directly at the key demographic that drives Broadway—Women,” who “drive 69% of the purchase decision.” The 1938 Daphne du Maurier novel upon which the musical is based is a school-lit perennial and a favorite among girls and women, with more than three million copies sold. What’s more, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation won the Oscar for best picture, the only Hitchcock film ever to do so. “Manderley,” the name of Maxim de Winter’s Cornish seaside mansion, has almost as much cultural resonance as “Rosebud.”

It was a slam dunk: a proven property built, as the PowerPoint presentation promises, “to run and run and run at a profit.” Sprecher, a seasoned, 58-year-old Off Broadway guy taking his first shot at being the lead producer of a big Broadway musical, made no bones about it: Rebecca had the potential to be the next Phantom of the Opera.

But something strange happened on the road to Manderley. Many strange things, actually. First of all, Rebecca was originally supposed to open in March of last year, not November, but the start date was postponed when a key investor scaled back the size of his investment. Then it was supposed to go into rehearsal in early September, but the show was postponed again because a different key investor suddenly died . . . of malaria . . . leaving a $4.5 million hole in the show’s projected $12 million budget. Then a New York Times reporter started raising questions publicly, in print, about whether the dead man had ever existed.

It would eventually come to light that, indeed, he never had, and that, according to a federal complaint, he was the invention of a Long Island stockbroker named Mark Hotton, whom Sprecher and his co-producer, Louise Forlenza, had hired to bring in backers. Hotton, the feds say, is a serial con man whose other misdeeds allegedly include defrauding several people out of their personal savings and forging a signature on a bank loan so he could buy a 50-foot yacht that he named Hott Catch.

It says a lot about the acute peculiarity of the Rebecca saga that the serial con man with a boat named Hott Catch isn’t even the most peculiar aspect of the story.

“Oh, My God—That’s It!”

Sprecher Entertainment occupies a building on West 52nd Street that abuts the August Wilson Theatre, where the musical Jersey Boys has been playing for more than seven years—precisely the kind of lengthy, open-ended tenancy that Sprecher dreams of for Rebecca. His offices are on the fifth floor, but, if you enter the building, you’ll notice that the buttons in the confessional-size elevator go up only to four. You take the elevator as high as it goes, and then you have to walk up a flight of scuffed stairs. Every working day, literally, this producer must put in extra effort to get to the top.

A framed photo on Sprecher’s office wall shows him looking young and perky, reveling in Mitzi Gaynor’s carnal embrace on the set of a touring production of Anything Goes. Now his eyes are weighted with bags—bags that puff up further when he cries, which he is prone to do when discussing his star-crossed Rebecca journey.

He gets so emotional, he told me, because he has staked his reputation, his finances, and his very career on bringing the show to Broadway. For all the obstacles he has encountered, Sprecher has not given up. As he put it to me the first time we spoke, “I cannot tell you how much I believe in this musical as a commercial project and as a piece of art. I am still . . . fucking . . . AT IT.”

Ben Sprecher (the name is pronounced Spreck-er) grew up in Southern California. In the early 1980s he settled in New York and, over the next two decades, made a name for himself as an Off Broadway producer and landlord. He owned both the Promenade Theatre, on the Upper West Side, and the Variety Arts, in the East Village, and also managed the Lucille Lortel, in the West Village. His theaters hosted the original New York productions of such plays as Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, David Rabe’s Hurlyburly, and Donald Margulies’s Dinner with Friends. As time went on, Sprecher gained some Broadway-producer credentials, albeit not as the lead producer, on such straight plays as the 2005 revival of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. A flattering 1995 profile of Sprecher in The New York Times presented him as “a driving force Off Broadway,” with no less a Broadway eminence than Gerald Schoenfeld, the chairman of the Shubert Organization, whom Sprecher regarded as a mentor, vouching for his talents.

The Rebecca that Sprecher wants to bring to Broadway is actually an adaptation of a German-language production, Rebecca—Das Musical, which had its premiere at the Raimund Theater, in Vienna, in 2006. Forlenza happened to be in Europe on business at the time and was at the Raimund on opening night. “I called Ben the next day, and I said—my exact quote—‘Holy shit! You have to see this production,’ ” Forlenza told me.

Sprecher flew to Vienna three weeks later and needed no further convincing. “I’m watching this thing,” he said, “and I’m thinking, Where are the Shuberts? Where are the Nederlanders? I’ve sat in the theater for thousands and thousands of shows. But when you see something you didn’t see coming, and, at the same time, is a phenomenally compelling story, beautifully gorgeous to look at, with fantastic music—I went, ‘Oh, my God—that’s it!’ ”

In 2008 he and Forlenza secured the English-language rights to Rebecca—Das Musical. The original plan was to unveil the show in London’s West End, in 2011. Sprecher hoped to re-create the Vienna production’s most dazzling effect, wherein the spiral staircase of Manderley catches fire and collapses into the ground. To achieve this effect, the Raimund Theater had been fitted with a large revolving floor mounted on an elevator that plummeted beneath the stage. However, when exploratory excavation was done at Rebecca’s designated London theater, the Shaftesbury, to see if it could accommodate such an elevator, the excavators hit water and the theater’s basement flooded. Rebecca’s producers dropped the London plan and decided to open on Broadway in 2012, with a new production design that required no excavation. The Shubert Organization promised Sprecher one of its theaters, the Broadhurst, and invested $500,000 in the show.

Yet money problems bedeviled the production from the start. Sprecher’s hopes of opening the show in March 2012 were dashed when Norton Herrick, a Florida real-estate developer and frequent Broadway investor, decided against making the seven-figure investment that the two men had discussed. (Herrick remains a six-figure investor in Rebecca.)

Broadway shows are always a risky enterprise, with only one in four turning a profit, but, on the face of it, Rebecca doesn’t seem like the most reckless of bets. The original production in Vienna ran for three years. Foreign-language adaptations have had or are still having successful runs in Tokyo, Seoul, Budapest, Helsinki, Belgrade, and Stuttgart. Furthermore, Sprecher has been able to wrangle top-shelf talent: to adapt the book, the playwright Christopher Hampton, an Oscar winner for Dangerous Liaisons and the man who skillfully translated Yasmina Reza’s ‘Art’ and God of Carnage for Broadway; and to co-direct, Francesca Zambello, the Vienna production’s original overseer, and the venerable Michael Blakemore, who, in 2000, became the only person ever to win a Tony in the same season for both best direction of a play (Copenhagen) and best direction of a musical (Kiss Me, Kate).

With all these factors in its favor, why would Rebecca have trouble raising money? Sprecher and Forlenza attribute at least some of the difficulty to the depressed financial climate. Others in the theater community think that it’s a matter of Sprecher’s being a Broadway small-timer; unlike such established Broadway producers as Roy Furman and Daryl Roth, he is not independently wealthy and has no core group of dedicated investors to draw upon.

The other widespread theater-world theory is that Rebecca is a European-style “sung-through” show—operatically bombastic, slim on spoken dialogue—that might not translate to U.S. audiences. This last characterization is particularly infuriating to the show’s creative team, who feel the U.S. show has been pre-emptively judged without so much as a single rehearsal. “I expected the Euro-pop charge to be leveled,” Blakemore told me, and he says that he and the original show’s European creators, the German lyricist Michael Kunze and the Hungarian composer Sylvester Levay, have consciously revamped the show for its proposed Broadway run. Besides, added Kunze, “what have been the biggest hits on Broadway? Phantom, Les Miz, Mamma Mia! Eurotrash is actually doing really great in New York.”

Nevertheless, as of early last year, Rebecca’s capitalization was stuck at about $6 million, only halfway toward its producers’ goal. Sprecher and Forlenza needed to find someone to help them get all the way to the promised land. Enter Mark Hotton.

Terrible News

It was Forlenza who served as Hotton’s point of entry. A certified public accountant from a working-class Bronx family, Forlenza, now 63, has done well for herself, cultivating both a wealthy clientele of financiers and an active involvement in theater production. One person she met through her clients is a man named Jeffrey Troncone, who was not interested in investing in Rebecca but offered to bring potentially interested parties her way. Some of the Troncone referrals were solid, and one, to a Bronx auto-dealership magnate named Bruce Bendell, panned out—Bendell has $250,000 in Rebecca. But Troncone also suggested that the producers get in touch with Hotton. (Troncone, who could not be reached for comment, has variously turned up in Web bios and executive profiles as a talent agent, a radio producer, and a tech start-up entrepreneur. In 1991 he pleaded guilty to two counts of mail fraud.)

Hotton told Forlenza and Sprecher that he was a stockbroker who had worked for Oppenheimer & Co., a prestigious boutique investment firm. True enough: he was employed by Oppenheimer from 2005 to 2009. What he didn’t tell them, they say, was that he had filed for bankruptcy only a year earlier, claiming $15 million in debts, or that he had settled two cases out of court in 2006 in which he was charged with misappropriating his clients’ money, or that he had a record of iffy-to-criminal dealings dating back to 1990.

Forlenza first met Hotton in January 2012 at a diner near his home, on Long Island. He was a beefy, cocksure man in his mid-40s. To Forlenza, he simply seemed a typical specimen of his type: “He wore the uniform. He wore the suit. He had the handkerchief, the perfect posture, the $40,000 gold Rolex watch.” The one thing that gave her pause was that Hotton said he and some friends had invested in some West End shows, in London, and had done “very well.” “I was kind of taken aback by that,” Forlenza said, “because most people in theater don’t say they’ve done ‘very well.’ ”

Still, she and Sprecher agreed to keep in touch with the broker, and a few weeks later he came back to them with good news: while he himself could not invest in the show, he had a group of foreign investors lined up, to the tune of $4.5 million—a huge score, and one that would more or less complete the show’s capitalization. Delighted, Sprecher and Forlenza worked out an arrangement in which Hotton would receive a proportionate percentage of the general partnership’s profits from the show in return for bringing the investors aboard.

According to the federal complaint, Hotton’s investors were led by one Paul Abrams, who was said to be a prosperous businessman from South Africa—though Abrams’s subscription agreement (the packet of documents that investors fill out to ratify their investment) gave his hometown as Hawthorn, Australia. A close inspection of these papers might have, and perhaps should have, raised some eyebrows: Hawthorn was misspelled as “Hawthorne,” and Abrams gave his e-mail address as miltonc@aol.com, a curiously unprofessional-seeming address (no company’s or law firm’s name?) for a man instigating a $2 million transaction. The remaining $2.5 million was to come from three Abrams associates: Roger Thomas, of Guernsey, Julian Spencer, of Chichester, Sussex, and Walter Timmons, of London.

Hotton was seemingly clever enough to assign these men credibly low-key Anglo names rather than something like Sir Nigel Moneybags, yet they too had strange e-mail addresses: pbranson687@gmail.com for Thomas, for example, and info@CPSEquity.com for Spencer. I asked Sprecher about this—why he, as the producer of a major Broadway show, did not find any of this shoddy or suspicious. “You’re looking at it in hindsight,” he said. “You know, I have an e-mail address for a guy who’s invested $400,000 that’s ‘peachfuzz2012.’ ”

Sprecher added that he had, in fact, spoken on the phone to someone purporting to be Timmons, but said with a sigh of resignation, “I accept the responsibility. . . . I’m not trying to defend this. I just wasn’t looking for it.” Forlenza, for her part, says she “fell off the track for February, March, and April,” the period when the investor correspondence was running heaviest, because it was tax season, the busiest period on her calendar.

Over the course of the spring and summer, Sprecher and Forlenza gave Hotton various sums of cash that added up to more than $60,000—not as payments, they insist, but as advances against his future earnings from Rebecca. The biggest was an expenditure of $18,000 for an African safari that Hotton said he had embarked upon with Abrams and his son in order to sort out the details of the investment. “Am I gonna say, ‘You shouldn’t play a round of golf with somebody in order to secure an investment’ ?,” Sprecher asked me.

I replied that a round of golf is one thing, and an $18,000 African safari is another.

“O.K., so I’m a schmuck!,” Sprecher said. “I’m trusting. I don’t assume people lie to me.”

And, in fairness, a non-imaginary Australian investor in Rebecca by the name of Ben Smith—a real-estate developer whose three-man group currently has the biggest stake in the show, at just under $2 million—told me that Hotton did a plausible job representing himself as a well-connected man of the world. “I actually spoke to Mark on a telephone hookup for a producer conference, and he was remarkably convincing in his presentation, well rehearsed in his responses,” Smith said. “He mentioned two or three prominent businesspeople he knew in Australia. It made me a little suspicious. One of them was deceased, and I said, ‘He passed away.’ But Mark said, ‘I understand—I deal with his family now.’ He rolled with it well.”

As the summer of 2012 began, Sprecher was confident that Rebecca was well on its way to an autumn opening. The delivery of the Abrams group’s investment, however, soon turned into a problem. Rehearsals were scheduled to begin on September 10, and yet, as of July, the Abrams group was the only one not to have made good on its release of funds. Sprecher e-mailed Hotton with increasing urgency. Then, late in July and early in August, Sprecher and Forlenza received a series of e-mails from Hotton forwarding them messages from Abrams’s assistants—one named Allison Montgomery, the other Jessica (no last name). These messages explained that Abrams had fallen ill during a long trip that had taken him from Africa to Monaco to his home in London. Specifically, Abrams had been “infected with Malaria and is in ICU for a artemisinin-based combination therapy.”

Jessica’s August 1 update was reassuring. Abrams, she wrote to Hotton, was “holding his own, still in ICU but OK.” But on Sunday, August 5, Hotton forwarded to the Rebecca producers a note he had received from Jessica that informed him, “I’m sorry to relay such Terrible news, Mr. Abrams passed away this evening and the family has asked for your attendance at the services.” Hotton assured Sprecher and Forlenza that he would travel to London right away to sort out the financial implications.

Sprecher was beside himself. He spent the next few weeks pestering Hotton and a man purporting to be the executor of Abrams’s estate, a Mr. Wexler (no first name), about getting the Abrams group to make good on its $4.5 million investment. These efforts proved fruitless. By the beginning of September, it was evident to Sprecher that there was no choice but to delay the production. On September 6, he and Forlenza summoned the show’s publicist, Marc Thibodeau, to an emergency meeting at Forlenza’s apartment, on the Upper East Side, in which they asked Thibodeau to draft a press release announcing Rebecca’s postponement.

On September 8, a Saturday, the press release went out. That very afternoon, Patrick Healy, the New York Times theater correspondent, posted an item on the paper’s ArtsBeat blog in which he related the producers’ story about the death of the investor, whose name they would not divulge. Two days later, a fuller, updated version of Healy’s story ran in print.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Healy’s dire article had an unexpected, providential effect. A day after its appearance in the paper, Sprecher received an unsolicited e-mail from a stranger named Larry Runsdorf. “I read about your production in the New York Times and that one of your investors has passed away,” Runsdorf wrote. “Perhaps I can become an investor and at least partially defray your shortfall.”

Sprecher suspected the note might be a prank, but he replied to it immediately, offering his phone number. Forty-five minutes later, Runsdorf called Sprecher, and Sprecher found himself bolting across town to Runsdorf’s office on East 42nd Street, to meet his potential savior. “He’s a nice guy, dressed in jeans, very affable,” Sprecher said. “He has my Web site up on his computer as I walk in.” The septuagenerian Runsdorf explained that he ran a company based in Florida called Breckenridge Pharmaceutical. Sprecher launched into his Rebecca sales pitch, concluding with the words “Sir, I don’t really know what world I’m in here. Are you a $50,000 player? Are you a million-dollar player?”

After some back-and-forth, Sprecher asked Runsdorf point-blank if he could “replace the dead guy,” Abrams, with an investment in the $2 million range. Runsdorf said yes, and they shook hands.

It had seemed almost too easy. Sprecher called his entertainment lawyer, Scott Lazarus, to explain what had just happened, and Lazarus told his client not to count on this scenario panning out. Yet Lazarus soon heard from two attorneys representing Runsdorf: Jonathan A. Lonner, a New York entertainment lawyer well known in the theater business, and Lawrence D. Levien, a partner at the Washington, D.C.-based powerhouse firm Akin Gump. Runsdorf ultimately committed to an investment of $2.25 million, with an important condition: he wanted anonymity.

On September 21, Sprecher went public with the good news that Rebecca was once again on track. Between the pending Runsdorf investment, a bridge loan Hotton was supposedly lining up (using properties owned by him, Sprecher, and Forlenza as collateral), and a pass-the-basket solicitation of further funds from his existing investors, the producer believed he would have adequate capitalization to get things rolling.

Meanwhile, Healy continued to investigate the dead-investor story, placing several calls to Sprecher, Thibodeau, and others involved in the show. (Healy declined to comment for this story, noting that Rebecca is an ongoing beat for him.) The reporter independently confirmed the identity of the purported dead man as Paul Abrams and started looking into his background. He found nothing: no business Web site, no biographical information, no obituaries.

On Tuesday, September 25, the Times published a front-page article by Healy headlined “REBECCA” SEES INVESTOR FADE, AS IF DREAMT. The article, slightly bemused in tone, detailed Healy’s findings, or lack thereof, about the elusive Mr. Abrams. Healy had gotten hold of Wexler’s e-mail address, but, when contacted, Wexler refused to offer the Times any comment. The address, Healy reported, had been created only the previous month—curiouser and curiouser.

Sprecher told me that, at the time of Healy’s page-one article, he, too, had come to suspect that something fishy was afoot with Paul Abrams, but nothing, he insisted, that made him suspicious of the man who had brought Abrams his way, Mark Hotton. What he had on his hands, he thought, was a breach-of-contract situation, and he and Forlenza planned on filing suit against the Abrams estate and Messrs. Thomas, Spencer, and Timmons—but only after Rebecca was up and running. “It was a problem for another day,” he said. “Our immediate focus was making sure that we were set for rehearsal on October 1.”

So, as much of a public-relations black eye as Healy’s article appeared to be, Sprecher didn’t really care—not as long as the Runsdorf investment, the linchpin of Rebecca’s revival, was moving forward.

Wednesday, September 26, marked the moment that the saga of Rebecca went from farcical to surreal. For one thing, it was the day that two F.B.I. agents presented themselves at Sprecher’s office door, asking him, politely but firmly, for all of his documentation pertaining to Paul Abrams. Sprecher called up a family friend, Ronald G. Russo, a criminal-defense attorney, for advice. Russo told me that it was clear to him that day, based on what Sprecher recounted, “that they’re suspecting him of criminal conduct”—that the F.B.I. investigators had reason to believe that Sprecher was himself complicit in the invention of Abrams and the perpetration of some kind of fraud.

Sprecher met with Russo and handed over all the subscription agreements from the Abrams group. Russo studied them and came away convinced that Sprecher was innocent of having fabricated the investors, though he noted that these investors’ common denominator was the middleman: Hotton. Now confident that Sprecher had nothing to hide, Russo placed some calls, kept the F.B.I. agents at bay, and arranged for the producer to meet with representatives of the bureau and the U.S. Attorney’s Office on Saturday, September 29.

Meanwhile, things were looking good on the Runsdorf front—sort of. Thursday, the day after the F.B.I. agents’ appearance, Rebecca’s lawyer, Lazarus, informed Sprecher and Forlenza that Runsdorf’s lawyers had received their client’s signed, executed subscription agreement. However, a small wrinkle had developed. On Tuesday afternoon, the producers learned, Runsdorf’s New York attorney, Lonner, had received an e-mail from a “Bethany Walsh,” from a Gmail address, that alluded to Healy’s page-one article. It read: “it is very very important that u read page one of todays newyork times if you havent already as there is serious possibility of fraud of grave concern.”

The following day, Levien, Runsdorf’s Washington attorney, received his own “Bethany Walsh” e-mail, albeit from a different Gmail address. This one simply attached a New York Post article by Michael Riedel, published that day, which followed up on Healy’s piece and cast doubt on Sprecher’s claim to have replaced the lost Abrams money, caustically suggesting that Sprecher’s new investors were the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny.

Fortunately for Sprecher and Forlenza, Bethany Walsh, whoever she was, proved not to be a deal breaker. It was alarming, to be sure, that someone had the inside information to target the attorneys of a man who had predicated his participation on anonymity. But Runsdorf’s lawyers merely requested that, as one last step, the subscription papers be re-drafted in the name of a business entity rather than in Runsdorf’s name.

Rebecca’s producers raised no objection. By that point, they had already instructed the cast to report the following Monday to the New 42nd Street Studios, a mid-Manhattan rehearsal facility. Despite all the delays, despite all the snags, despite Sprecher’s looming sit-down with the F.B.I., it was full steam ahead.

The Friday before rehearsals were to begin, September 28, was a day of palpable excitement for Rebecca’s cast. Led by Jill Paice (the new Mrs. de Winter), Ryan Silverman (Maxim de Winter), Karen Mason (de Winter’s deranged housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers), and James Barbour (Rebecca’s sinister cousin), the group had forged an unusual closeness through the postponements and setbacks. “We were all sending out e-mails: ‘Can’t wait to actually start this!’ ” said Mason. An actress and singer warmly regarded in the theater and cabaret worlds, Mason is one of those troupers who have put in years as an understudy or replacement and was finally slated to get her big chance in a chewy, showy, pipes-showcasing, unabashedly Tony-baiting role. “I thought, I’m gonna go out and buy my first-day-of-rehearsal outfit! I splurged and got a really beautiful pair of pants,” she told me, pausing for dramatic effect. “Good thing they were returnable.”

Enter Ms. Finkelstein

That Friday began hopefully, if hectically, for Sprecher and Forlenza. The only item they needed to complete the underwriting of the bridge loan seemed to be a copy of the title on a property that Hotton supposedly owned in southern New Jersey: one piece of paper. “I said, ‘Louise, we cannot rely on anybody else, no lawyers, no nothing, to get this paper,’ ” Sprecher recalled. So, in the pouring rain, the two of them, in Sprecher’s black 2003 Ford Expedition, set out for the New Jersey town where the title was allegedly filed.

They got as far as Newark when, shortly before one P.M., Forlenza received an e-mail from their production’s lawyer, Lazarus, with Sprecher also on the recipient list. Attached to Lazarus’s message was an e-mail that had been sent directly to Larry Runsdorf himself at 7:21 that morning. It was from a “Sarah Finkelstein,” again using a Gmail account, and it didn’t mince words. Forlenza read it aloud to Sprecher:

The walls are about to cave in on Mr Sprecher and the Rebecca Broadwayproduction. It is a near certainty that the man Paul Abrams was made up several months ago to defraud other investors as a placeholder to give them a sense of security as well as the owners of the theater the Shuberts while Mr Sprecher continued to try and raise money. When that money wasn’t raised by August Mr Sprecher or someone associated with him came up with the story that Paul Abrams had died. Mr Sprecher hasnt been able to come up with any information to prove that Paul Abrams was a real person. In fact any information he has provided has proven to be extremely suspicious. It is inevitable that the truth will come out in a matter of days or weeks that the Paul Abrams story was definitively made up and at that point there will be charges of fraud, lawsuits etc.

The e-mail went on a bit more, concluding with a warning from Finkelstein that the only reason to invest in Rebecca would be for a tax write-off or to get caught up in a fraud trial.

Such was Sprecher’s sudden state of tearful agitation that Forlenza told him to pull over into the parking lot of a nearby McDonald’s. While sitting there, the two producers got word from Lazarus that Runsdorf was withdrawing as an investor. (Neither Runsdorf nor his lawyers responded to requests for comment. Lazarus also declined to comment.) Sprecher stepped out of the car, into the rain, sobbing uncontrollably.

“He was crying and crying and crying,” Forlenza said. “He was very upset. And I certainly didn’t want anything to physically happen to him. And I got his wife on the phone, and, somehow or other, we kind of brought him back to reality a bit.” They turned the car around and drove back to Manhattan, where Sprecher commiserated with his wife and with Russo, his legal adviser.

On top of everything else that Sprecher had to worry about, there was the appointment with the F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney’s Office the following day. Russo decided that, before the meeting took place, he wanted to check out this Mark Hotton character face-to-face. At Russo’s urging, Sprecher placed a call to Hotton and put Russo on the phone. Russo asked Hotton if the three of them could meet the next morning. Hotton agreed, naming a diner out on Long Island as the rendezvous spot.

That evening, Russo arranged for a fourth man to attend the breakfast: Thomas Kelly of the private-investigation firm Stroz Friedberg, whom he would introduce to Hotton simply as “my colleague.” In the diner, Russo quizzed Hotton about Abrams. Hotton confidently related tales of the high life he had enjoyed with the now sadly departed malaria victim: in Abrams’s Learjet, at the Savoy hotel in London, at the restaurant Nobu. After Hotton left the diner, Kelly told the remaining two men that he did not find the middleman credible. Sprecher swears that this was the first time he had any notion that Hotton might be a crook.

Sprecher and Russo proceeded straight from the diner to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, in Lower Manhattan. With F.B.I. agents present, Sprecher spent about three hours answering questions from Sarah E. McCallum, a federal prosecutor. When he got out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Sprecher was told by Russo that he should never again speak to Mark Hotton.

Checking his phone after his grilling by the feds, Sprecher was shocked to find an agonized e-mail message from Thibodeau, the publicist, tendering his resignation. “When you and Louise told me the entire Abrams story three weeks ago,” Thibodeau wrote, alluding to Abrams’s alleged death and the shortfall it created, “I completely believed you, and felt nothing but compassion and a desire to help in every way I could. But since then I have felt nothing but stress, and as the days have gone by, the amount of questions have just grown, and the plausibility of the story has evaporated.”

Thibodeau went on to describe how he’d tried in the intervening weeks to raise red flags about Abrams and Hotton, but “you immediately said you didn’t want to talk about it, and changed the subject.” He concluded the note by telling Sprecher, “You’ve been nothing but a good guy to me, and I know what an incredibly difficult time this is and has been for you. And I really hope it somehow can still work out, but for my own well-being, I just can’t be part of this anymore.”

By this time, a decision had already been made to convene the producers, the creative team, and three senior members of the cast—Mason, Barbour, and Nick Wyman, a veteran character actor who also happens to be the president of the Actors’ Equity union—in Sprecher’s office on Sunday afternoon, where everyone would get the bad news: once again, Rebecca would not be going into rehearsal. Sprecher felt he needed Thibodeau more than ever to help manage the crisis. He called the publicist and pleaded with him to stay on for one more day, just long enough to send out a press release explaining that Rebecca had once again encountered a crippling shortfall, this time on account of a vicious e-mail that scared off the show’s new angel investor. Reluctantly, Thibodeau agreed to see the process through.

The Sunday-afternoon meeting unfolded funereally. “Ben read the anonymous e-mail aloud, but he couldn’t continue—he got choked up, so he had his lawyer, Russo, continue,” recalled Wyman. As the meeting concluded, Thibodeau, who was not present, fulfilled his final obligation to Rebecca before being allowed to walk: clicking “Send” on the latest Rebecca-postponement release.

Two weeks later, Mark Hotton was perp-walked out of his waterfront house in West Islip, New York, by federal agents—and they weren’t even arresting him for the Rebecca fraud. The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, which covers Long Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, had Hotton hauled in, along with his wife and three co-conspirators, for an alleged $3.7 million wire-fraud and money-laundering scheme.

On the same day, though, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District, which covers Manhattan, unsealed a complaint charging Hotton with a scheme to defraud the producers of Rebecca, the Musical. The complaint offered concrete proof of what many had suspected: that Paul Abrams was a Hotton invention, and that the e-mail addresses and Web sites associated with Abrams, Wexler, Jessica, et al. had all been created by Hotton. (Hotton has pleaded not guilty to all charges brought against him, both in the Eastern and Southern Districts. His alleged co-conspirators have also pleaded not guilty.)

Left unexplained in the complaint, and still a source of puzzlement, is what Hotton’s long game was. Given that he is alleged to have fleeced other victims of six- and seven-figure sums, the $60,000 in cash he extracted from Rebecca is nothing; presumably, there was a Part Two to his Abrams scheme. For now, though, we can’t find out; Hotton is incarcerated without bail, and Ira London, the attorney defending him in the Southern District, would not comment on his case.

Sprecher and Forlenza wasted little time in filing a $100 million suit against Hotton and his wife, but what troubled them more was the mystery of who had chased off their angel investor, Larry Runsdorf. Was Hotton somehow in on that too?

By naming in their complaint not only the Hottons but also the “John/Jane Does” who sent the pseudonymous e-mails to Team Runsdorf, the Rebecca partners’ lawyers obtained subpoena authority to trace the messages. In November, Google informed Russo’s law firm that the two “Bethany Walsh” Gmail accounts had been created on September 25, and that the “Sarah Finkelstein” account had been created on September 28. All three accounts had an I.P. (Internet protocol) address in common, traceable to Jersey City, New Jersey. It took until December 12 for Verizon, the Internet-service provider for the client using this I.P. address, to cough up a customer name: Marc Thibodeau.

Sprecher’s lawyers immediately forwarded the Verizon document to their client. When he clicked it open, he stood up in shock, walked over to a diagonally sloping wall in his office, and leaned his head on it, sobbing anew. He had never suspected.

Acting Alone

Marc Thibodeau lives in a neighborhood of glassy towers in Jersey City. He is a tall, athletically built man, 52 years old but younger looking, as sleekly attractive as Sprecher is exhaustedly schlubby. His apartment affords beautiful panoramic views across the Hudson to Manhattan. Though his firm, the Publicity Office, keeps offices in 1650 Broadway, Thibodeau often works at home, on a laptop, from this quiet perch above the river.

Thibodeau is widely regarded as a benign, low-key industry figure, known for representing such long-running warhorses as The Phantom of the Opera and Chicago. “As a publicist, I would say I’m atypical,” he told me when I visited him at his home. “I can’t stand any attention or focus on me.” Which is why he is mortified to be involved in the Rebecca mess, even if unapologetic about his actions. Yes, he did it—he sent the e-mails. But, he made plain, he felt he had a moral obligation to do so.

It was on September 6, the day he was summoned to the meeting at Forlenza’s apartment, that Thibodeau learned of the Abrams situation and heard Hotton’s name for the first time. He sensed that the announcement of yet another Rebecca postponement would get a lot of negative play in the press, and, he told me, he urged Sprecher and Forlenza to be as open as possible. He subsequently drafted a press release announcing the death of Paul Abrams, and, hence, the postponement of Rebecca. He also asked the producers for biographical information about Abrams. At this, he said, “they immediately called me and said, ‘You gotta take his name out of the press release,’ and ‘We have to protect our investors’ privacy.’ ” The release went out on September 8 without Abrams’s name.

In the two weeks that followed, Thibodeau said, Healy, the Times reporter, was “digging and digging and digging” on the dead-investor story, trying to ID the stiff and putting lots of pressure on the publicist to give up the name. Thibodeau refused, he said, but warned Sprecher and Forlenza that the Times was on the case.

In the two days preceding Healy’s front-page September 25 story, Thibodeau did some reporting of his own. He performed a Google search with the keywords “Mark Hotton” and “Long Island” and found stories about frauds that Hotton was alleged to have perpetrated. He scrutinized the Abrams subscription agreement and discovered that Hawthorn was misspelled as “Hawthorne,” that the street address listed was nonexistent, and that the telephone number listed was nonworking.

“I am not doing a thing with this other than telling you,” Thibodeau wrote to Sprecher in an e-mail on September 23, referring to what he’d found out about Hotton. “Ive never mentioned the name to Healy and wont.” Thibodeau said Sprecher’s reaction was essentially to tell him that he should leave the matter alone, that “people like Mark, who deal with wealthy people, there are all these things out there about them all the time.”

The following day, Thibodeau drafted an e-mail to Sprecher laying out the discrepancies between the information in Abrams’s subscription papers and the reality on the ground, concluding, “Everything I’ve seen/found out the past few days makes me increasingly more convinced you’ve been scammed somehow.” Before he could send the e-mail, Sprecher called him, so Thibodeau aired his concerns verbally. “And all Ben says to me,” he said, “is ‘Marc, you know what? We’re not gonna talk about this anymore. The only thing I want to talk about is our strategy for announcing we’re going back into rehearsals.’ ”

Healy’s big article ran in the following morning’s paper. Thibodeau was at that point convinced that Abrams was fictitious and that Hotton had something to do with whatever was going on. Thibodeau was also queasily unsure if Sprecher, the man he was working for, was merely an innocent bystander. Based on the way Sprecher had brushed off his concerns about fraud, Thibodeau said, “I started to think, Maybe he is aware of it. That’s when I lost faith in him.”

For Thibodeau, his discoveries about Abrams and Hotton created another ethical quandary: about himself. Larry Runsdorf, he realized, had come forward with his $2.25 million after reading a Patrick Healy story that was triggered by a press release that he, Thibodeau, had issued—the September 8 one that stated that Rebecca had been postponed because of the death of an investor. “I actually take a lot of pride in the releases I send out always being truthful,” he said. “I had come to realize that the press release that went out from me and my office, that pulled [Runsdorf] in, completely perpetuated this whole fictional fraud.”

Thibodeau felt tormented by the notion that he had become an unwitting accomplice in the potential fleecing of Runsdorf. He felt compelled to take action. Privy to Rebecca’s investor information, he located the e-mail addresses of Runsdorf’s attorneys and sent each of them a message that, he explained to me, “was saying, You know, there’s a serious possibility of fraud here.” Thibodeau doesn’t know exactly how he arrived at the name Bethany Walsh—“My mother’s maiden name is Walsh, and maybe I had seen Bethenny Frankel on the Today show that morning”—but he thought he had covered his tracks by sending the e-mail to Levien from a pay-as-you-use computer in a coffee shop and the e-mail to Lonner from a similar computer in a FedEx Kinko’s.

“I’m not completely stupid, and I know that e-mails can be traced. But I always thought it was where the e-mail was sent from,” he said. “It’s actually everything: where the Google account was created, where the account might have been checked,” and so on. In any event, to Thibodeau’s frustration, Bethany did not receive a response. “If either one of them had said, ‘Thank you for sending this to us—we will look into it,’ it would have made me go, ‘O.K., I’ve done what I feel should have been done and it’s in their hands now,’ ” he said.

And so, with the days to rehearsal counting down—“and each day Ben had been saying that the final piece of money would come in that day, and then the day would go by with that money not coming in”—Thibodeau grew increasingly agitated. Early the morning of Friday the 28th, unable to sleep, he located Runsdorf’s work e-mail address online, taking care not to use the personal address in the Rebecca files, and composed the Sarah Finkelstein e-mail.

I asked Thibodeau a question that many people, including Sprecher, Russo, and members of the Rebecca cast, have asked rhetorically: Why didn’t he just quit? Why, if he thought that Sprecher was, at best, a blinkered scam victim, or, at worst, a scammer, didn’t Thibodeau just hightail it out of Rebecca-land without sending any e-mails, thereby extricating himself from the production and sparing himself future entanglement in a protracted legal brouhaha?

“Why didn’t I just wash my hands of it all and say, ‘You know, not my problem’?” he asked back. “I just felt it was not right, you know?” Thibodeau, though he had never met Runsdorf, felt that the man deserved a fuller picture of what was going on in Rebecca than had been provided to him. “My intent was really, truly, just to make sure this man had the information, the truth,” Thibodeau said. “And then he could do whatever the heck he wanted with it.”

Thibodeau had contemplated resigning the day before he became Sarah Finkelstein, drafting an e-mail of resignation on September 27 not unlike the one he finally sent to Sprecher on September 29. He opted not to send the Thursday one because, with all the coverage Rebecca was getting, with all the phone calls he was fielding from Patrick Healy, there was no way to resign quietly, and “the last thing in the world you want to do as a publicist is become the story”—an indication of just how muddled his state of mind was.

It got even worse for Thibodeau when he did resign. Sprecher begged him to stay on just long enough to handle the press release announcing the delay of Rebecca, the Musical due to an “extremely malicious e-mail, filled with lies and innuendo.” So insistent was the emotional Sprecher, pleading, “I need you to do one last thing for me, then you never have to talk to me again,” that Thibodeau gave in, on the condition that the release not be issued on his company’s letterhead. Sprecher and Forlenza provided a list of people to whom the statement was to be sent, and, on the evening of Sunday, September 30, from Jersey City, Thibodeau, the very e-mailer deemed “extremely malicious” in the statement, sent out the release.

“It was the most bizarre moment in my life,” he said. “It was horrifying.”

Although Thibodeau has not been charged with a crime, he hired a criminal-defense attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, almost immediately after resigning from Rebecca. He did this, he said, because Sprecher, not yet wise to the identity of the mystery e-mailer, told him, “This is a vicious crime, and we’ve gone to the F.B.I. about this person, and we’ll get him.”

Lichtman, in a telephone interview, told me that he views his client as someone who blew the whistle on an illicit operation, and that Sprecher was “either directly involved in a fraud or it was conscious avoidance, which is the same thing legally.” The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he noted, has launched its own investigation of Rebecca, specifically looking into how Sprecher represented the show to Runsdorf. (Sprecher described Lichtman’s comments to me as an “out-and-out misrepresentation of the facts.” Of the S.E.C., he said, “We are an open book and have welcomed their investigation.”)

The weeks and months that followed Rebecca’s late-September collapse were harrowing for Thibodeau. “I was just in complete, utter fear,” he said. “I expected a knock on the door all the time. I was scared to go to the office. There was one day I rode around Liberty State Park on my bike for six straight hours, just in circles.”

So it was, perversely, something of a relief to Thibodeau when, finally, on January 29 of this year, he was served with Sprecher and Forlenza’s lawsuit. The suit contained a surprise. Sprecher and Forlenza’s civil complaint not only names Thibodeau but also extends to “Defendants John/Jane Does 1–3,” described as “an unknown individual or individuals who induced Thibodeau” to send the three e-mails. These mystery defendants “are individuals having an interest in seeing Plaintiffs’ efforts to produce Rebecca fail and Plaintiffs’ rights in and to Rebecca lapse.”

In other words, the producers and their lawyers are allowing for the possibility that there are larger forces at work, and that Thibodeau has been rewarded for doing someone else’s bidding. Some rumors have been floated: Thibodeau represents Phantom of the Opera; Andrew Lloyd Webber sure would like to make the “next Phantom” go away, now, wouldn’t he? Wait, Thibodeau has for years worked with the producer Cameron Mackintosh—and wouldn’t he like to get his hands on the Rebecca rights! Thibodeau is exasperated by the paper existence of Defendants John/Jane Does 1–3. “I am saying, unequivocally, that I acted alone,” he told me. “That has been the most terrible part of this, that they’ve put that out there—to the industry, to the press, to the public. Because anyone can judge if I should have gone ahead and sent the e-mails. They can judge if I should have quit first. But this notion of conspiracy has upset me. There’s not a shred of truth to that.”

What upsets Sprecher is that Thibodeau drew legal conclusions before any law-enforcement authorities did, and acted upon them in a surreptitious rather than aboveboard way. “He’s the judge, now he’s the jury—and then he says ‘Guilty!,’ ” Sprecher said. He is adamant that he didn’t dismiss Thibodeau’s concerns about Abrams and Hotton, but, rather, was in tunnel-vision mode, preoccupied with rounding up the final financing and moving forward. Given the pending influx of Runsdorf’s funds, Sprecher said, “we had already solved the problem with the Hotton investors.”

And if Thibodeau had really been so morally conflicted about what he’d learned, Sprecher said, he should have either notified law enforcement or worked harder to get Sprecher’s attention. “Why didn’t he call the police?” he said. “Why didn’t he call the F.B.I.? He stayed with me! He gave me the impression that I had an ally. Let’s assume I’m completely wrong: I’m daft. I fucked this up big-time. I’m a schmuck! Why didn’t he come over, like my friend, and go, ‘Asshole, what’s wrong with you?’ Maybe he had to come in here and slap me around a couple of times. Why did he have to crash the show?”

The Show Must Go On

As of this writing, the suit against Thibodeau and Hotton remains unresolved. The Broadhurst Theatre has been given over to Lucky Guy, starring Tom Hanks. The sets for Rebecca sit, fully built, in a storage facility. Sprecher still holds the English-language rights to the musical through the end of this calendar year, and he insists that he’s making progress toward an autumn premiere. In mid-March, he presided over a backers’ audition at the New Jersey home of a wealthy lawyer couple, Barbara and Phillip Sellinger, in which his four leads, Paice, Silverman, Mason, and Barbour, performed a medley of Rebecca songs before more than 100 living, breathing affluent people—a percentage of whom, he is in the process of finding out, just might bring the show to its optimal capitalization. Given the delays and cost overruns, Rebecca has gone from being a $12 million musical to a $16 million musical. “I can do it for 14, but I’d like to have the 16,” Sprecher said.

Though he has his doubters and belittlers, Sprecher retains the support and sympathy of his creative team and cast. Nick Wyman, who, it bears mentioning again, is the president of the actors’ union, told me he would still gladly drop everything, including the play he was doing up in Albany when I talked to him, if Sprecher announced, for the fourth time, that Rebecca is going into rehearsals. He trusts Sprecher more than he trusts Thibodeau.

“Marc’s defense that he’s a whistle-blower, saying he wanted to protect this person from throwing good money after bad—that smells to me more than Mark Hotton!,” Wyman said. “What is the basis of my industry if not throwing good money after bad? That’s the story of investing in Broadway!”